JAX-WS tarpit

I'm currently doing some work with an open source framework (to be left unnamed) built upon JAX-WS (using SOAP, SAML, and HTTPS). I'm making headway working with it, but talk about a tar pit. You go into the code and it's almost impossible to get out. Every time you gain a bit of understanding, some other anti-pattern slaps you until you see starts and you're back to global searches with google and looking through the code to make further progress.

Violations of the DRY principle are rampant. The generated code has magic constants sprinkled liberally throughout. Generated classes have default constructors and public getters and setters for all fields despite the fact that some fields are actually required; no hashCode; no equals; no ability to determine if one of these data objects is valid or not. Turning the WSDL into code generates vast numbers of classes (reminding me of the terrible mapping from CORBA IDL to Java). The generated code has almost no helpful comments (despite the fact that generating at least some reasonable back-references in generated code is easy precisely because you are generating code). And we've only delved a bit into the SAML aspects of things; I expect that to be another can of worms entirely.

I've heard that the SOAP/WS-* specifications were co-opted by certain large companies and made so complex it's nearly impossible to work with them except with the very big IDEs-with-god-complexes those vendors sell. Based on these experiences and previous ones working with some SOA frameworks, I can believe it. If that isn't the reason for their incredible opaqueness and anti-patterns, I'm afraid to find out who thought all of this was a good idea.

So while I'm making progress and getting things done, the entire experience makes me want to go wash my hands and update my resume.

If you know of good ways to work with this stuff short of plunking down vast quantities of money for some IDE that will sort-of/mostly/kind-of hide all the complexity (until the moment things break and you really need to understand what is going on), I'd love to hear about them...